Now there's a few different interfaces/stylesheet changes per machine type,
iPhone , mobiles , Wii and iGoogle . This is on top of existing changes to the interface.
But thats only the start, in response to feedback. Chris has added integration with the BBC's Radio Pop beta, using the Radio Pop API. So now you can Pop your trackplaying habits to Radiopop. Chris is using OAuth to pass the users information back and forth smoothly.
Chris evening are pretty full because he's also trying to add Last.FM support, so like Radiopop, you can add tracksplaying to your audio-scobbling and Instant messenger support via imified.com.
Following from the previous prototype Adam has launched his twitter bot which will recommend you other artists based on one you send it. It was first demoed at Mashed 08 but has now gone live for anyone using twitter to use. Just send a message using @recomme or direct message recomme with a single artist name and it will search through last.fm and other sources like /programmes for other artists it thinks you might like. Simple but clever.
A new Mashup from Chris Riley, this time it shows as much information about a playing track as it can on one screen and updates in real time with the last.fm feed. The interesting part is, where you can put in your last.fm username and it will look and see if you will like the current track. Awesome stuff
I've written a new mashup - http://www.trackplaying.com - it displays information about the track currently playing on the radio. It takes data from BBC Music (beta), Last.fm and Amazon, and is hosted on Google App Engine. Mashup heaven! It is based on my previous attempt that some of you may recall.
For the past 6 or 7 years I have run http://www.dailysnooze.com - mainly because I wanted a quick loading simple homepage for my browser, which included the BBC headlines and weather. Long gone are the days of screen scraping the bbc news pages and now luckily we have access to some nice feeds!
Things have moved on a little and we now have a few extras based on backstage feeds:
I only just released the gadgets so thought I should share them a bit further. They are also available from the website itself.For the homepage the brief I have always stuck to is "quick loading and simple", and I like to think I have a good balance in my slightly biased opinion.
From the tech side of things the gadgets/homepage get their data from my
hosted DB and associated web services. I have an app running at home which
updates the server DB regularly with the feed information.
Infused news was created as part of an Internet Computing degree at the University of Hull, Scarborough Campus named "An investigation into the need for user-submitted, multimedia content when delivering news". The aim was to integrate user-submitted, multimedia elements into existing news stories and evaluate whether or not this augmented version of the news not only makes the story more compelling, action provoking and understandable for the user, but to investigate whether the use of multiple sources gives the news story a more balanced, honest and up-to-date view of the news story.
The application takes an rss feed of BBC data provided at http://dev.barnesdmd.co.uk/ff/?ffid=2. Keywords are extracted using the Yahoo Term extractor and these are used to retrive data from YouTube and Flickr, the phpFlickr classes were used to acheive this (http://phpflickr.com/).
The mix of media (Imagery, Sound and Video) often enhanced the story being presented. The keywords used often return media isn't relevant due to keywords not being given enough context, or media being tagged incorrectly. If more time or the funding was made available I would look further into utilising Ambient Interface technology so that the application could deliver the information in an engaing way.
BBC News Algorithmic Sorter an attempt to try and work out what the British public are finding important. The main BBC News website offers a glimpse of what’s popular, but as with all things that’s limited to the audience of the BBC. While this gives a somewhat true to form view of what people are interested in, I wanted to expand it, and thus came up with the BNAS site. The main site isn’t that impressive as the main focus was on the backend.
The script uses several external APIs from blogging communities, search engines and social networking sites to work out what people are talking about. Then using the last 50 Data from the BBC it compiles a list in order of the interest the British public has on the subject. At the time of writing this Lock keepers' cottage sale halted is the least interesting story, and Oil price up despite Saudi pledge the most. It’s not 100%, and sometimes odd results show. The system works like a automated Digg.com.
The guys at the BBC Radio Labs have been up late again. This time while at Xtech, they have transformed the BBC Radio's programme schedule into RDF and many other types of data. Of course this is all RESTful using a API but they have taken it one step further and decided to play with XMPP (jabber) so they can create notifications of things your interested in complete with data from DBpedia.
A new prototype based on Radio 1's now playing data but this time from a BBC member of staff working in their 10% project. Simon goes into details.
We're working on a new 10% time project over here at FM&T Audio and Music - and we thought we'd give you guys a super sneak preview. There's a few of us involved here, including Yasser Rashid, Cathy Bartlet and Ramon Dodd.Its around visualizing now playing information by pulling in data from across the web.
The plan for this is to eventually build a flash version which is full-screenable to provide a visual companion while listening in the office, or on the web etc. Future data sources we hope to build on include Musicbrainz, Wikipedia, YouTube, song lyrics,Yahoo Music and loads more. At the moment, we've just got as far as last.fm, flickr and the webcam, but its a start!
New Prototype from Chris Riley, instead of rating how in touch is the BBC, he's scratching his own itch about the music playing over Radio 1, Radio 2, 1Xtra and 6 Music.
I've coded a hopefully useful, if not idea stimulating web page. It is
called Now Playing http://cgriley.com/nowplaying/ and shows you
information about the artist currently being played on BBC Radio 1,
BBC 1xtra, BBC Radio 2 and BBC 6 Music. It is based on some BBC data
released at hack day, with Yahoo Pipes and JQuery thrown in.
I made it because when I'm listening to the radio I like to know a bit
more about the artist. Have I heard some of their tracks or albums
before? If I've no idea who they are what have they done in the past?
How much can I buy their albums for, what has been released? What is
on their website, do they have a website? Which artists are they like?
All those questions are answered by this new page. It is designed to
update itself in real time with the current artist being played, and
seems to work quite well. As always the best way to see what it does
is to give it a go, and if you want more info about how it works, data
sources, known issues etc. then there is an obligatory about page.
http://cgriley.com/nowplaying/about.aspx
Facebook applications are hot at the moment and this one is even on my very tight list of application. Great work Ben Smith, but I'm sure the entries above are certainly not for me. Anyway Ben has more details...
Find friends (or, currently, name-sakes of your friends) that have been on BBC TV, what programmes and when they were aired. Currently, this finds the first TV programme's 'contributor' to match your friend's name, through the BBC Programme Catalogue (http://catalogue.bbc.co.uk).Future developments will involve giving you the choice of all possible matches to identify from and integration with IMDB (http://www.imdb.com).
Anomalous uses the BBC's news feeds to create a metaverse or stories arranged in a 3D space according to the time they were released and their relevance to the user.
By applying aspects of time and space the stories take on a representational structure creating a spiral of news and information.
Allows searching of the BBC Travel News RSS feeds for certain roads (using a special way of searching to ensure you only get, for example, problems on the M5, as opposed to problems on the M6 near the junction with the M5) or certain places. Is rather crude at the moment, but works - and I use it at work before starting the journey home. As for improvements - well see the todo page on the site - but the UI could do with a lot of improvements, and a way to select which feed to search would be good.
Basically I wrote this to deal with a personal niggle (that of having to use the IE search function to search for traffic problems that might affect me) and thought others might find it useful too.
If anyone's interested, then it's written using eRuby and runs on my apache webserver, which sits in my bedroom (that's why it's slow!).
A very simple yahoo pipe to track your favourite sports team (or any sports news)
You can get your own rss feed to paste into your news reader by entering a query and then subscribing to that feed. My default is Cardiff City (its all bad news at the moment), but you can enter any term to search the bbc sports section.
Starting with the BBC's lovely, tightly-written and edited news headlines and descriptions, Multi-Search uses Yahoo!'s term extraction API, Google's blog search, and Yahoo!'s Web search--run through Pipes when necessary--to retrieve current stories plus the associated buzz from the blogosphere.
An Opera widget that overlays the BBC Traffic tpegML files onto Google Maps, and sits on the desktop. An entry into the current Opera Software widgets competition (http://widgets.opera.com).
It features a continuous news ticker, a browseable list and a details view, all of which link into the interactive map.
I hope to improve the display of the details, perhaps a useful icon and colour scheme for quick reference.
Mojiti.com is a free online video annotation service that allows users to add comments and information directly onto online video via our overlay technology. Without changing the underlying video content, users can now add text, shapes, flash art and multimedia onto the video screen.
With more and more video content becoming available online, our goal is to continue to make online video a more interactive and engaging experience. Using Mojiti's RSS feed annotation, I have very easily taken an online BBC news clip and a BBC weather report and added the relevant live RSS feed to the screen. Now as users watch the video, the latest news can also stream across via the RSS feed.
News clip: http://mojiti.com/kan/3937/10619 (On this video, I also happen to add a BBC logo and made it clickable so that viewers can get redirected to the BBC website.) Weather clip: http://mojiti.com/kan/3930/10597 (These videos can also be directly embedded onto backstage.bbc.co.uk if you think viewers would be interested to see these examples.)
In the past I had a greasemonkey script that no longer works, and building on my previous prototype
and because google maps now supports geoRss, and the backstage feeds dont do geoRss (something to work on?) I decided to do it myself.
You can now display the traffic data direct on the google maps site. This might be more handy for people who want the geoRss data, but i thought putting it on google was the best way to display it.
Direct google link is http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=http://bbc.blueghost.co.uk/travel_data/locations.rss
My Yahoo Widget is written to provide local traffic information direct to your desktop. The idea started, as there doesn't appear to be an easy way to find any road incidents within 5/10/15/etc miles of your current location.
The widget currently accepts a postcode and a range set in the preferences and retrieves the all incidents within the range from the specified postcode.
The server is updating its database from the Backstage Traffic Data feeds and then providing the information via a simple xml feed that is then used for both the Widget and the Google map on the site.
I just need to find some time to add the additional information in the Traffic feeds to the Widget and improve the quality and presentation of the information provided.
Not precisely a BBC hack, Badger will take any RSS feed and package it up nicely into a proxy-free Web badge, via Yahoo's new Pipes beta. Here's the BBC's World News feed, all badged up and ready to go.
This is a Google Maps application showing live and historic traffic data from the BBC TPEG road traffic data. Also includes an 'Accident Blackspots' section which is created by analysing traffic data collected over the last 4 months (and growing).
This has been built as part of a project for my degree course in Engineering. To improve it, I have several ideas which may involve the BBC weather data as well (perhaps using some machine learning algorithms to find patterns in the relationship between weather and traffic incidents).
In the past I had a grease monkey script that no longer works, and building on my previous prototype
and because google maps now supports geoRss, and the backstage feeds dont do geoRss (something to work on? - maybe) I decided to do it myself. You can now display the traffic data direct on the google maps site. This might be more handy for people who want the geoRss data, but i thought putting it on google was the best way to display it. Direct google link is http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=http://bbc.blueghost.co.uk/travel_data/locations.rss
It uses Yahoo pipes to strip out a lot of extraneous info from the feed to make it easier for Twitter to read.
The twitter feed is here: http://twitter.com/londonweather/
A neat improvement would be if the BBC's weather feed split out the different data - temperature, visibility etc. into different pieces of tagged data within the feed, rather than just a description, date, link - although if I had more time I'd do something interesting with the geodata in there.
The page includes links to all the tools I used, so anyone should be able to hook one of these up for where they live.
Martin Kamara, has started working on a Twitter bot which reads TV Anytime data. He plans to release the source back into the public under a GPL licence.
Tv_twitter is a twitter bot I wrote in perl that reads tv-anytime data and broadcasts it using the twitter network. I wrote it with BBC’s tv and radio content in mind, inspired by backstage.bbc.co.uk. The bot is currently updating http://twitter.com/bbcone with the current program on BBC ONE and a short synopsis of it. It is still in pre_release state but if you are interested in running it or doing something else with it the source code available from the repository. A stable version should be out within a week.
A Google Gadget for the Google Personalized homepage which lift the top stories thingy on the BBC News Frontpage.
I believe I need to improve the appearance in IE6. It looks nice in FireFox though. Given the time I would implement the whole stats thing which is available on the BBC site i.e. top story by hour and location.
Sorry ! yet another google maps related project. Because the BBC weather feed uses a somewhat user unfriendly "weather ID" number for it's query of a city location I had to screen scrape all 7-8 thousand into a Mysql database. This maked it possible to query a whole country's weather. When I get around to it I hope to open up my database for POST / GET weather requests to RSS 2. Keep an eye on the page for details.
Mario has been playing with the Twitter API and created a user for BBC News, which twitter's Breaking news to other users following it. Some what like a IM bot but for the twitter network. To subscribe you just need to add bbcnews to your friends or follow bbcnews.
Just came across this map (as I was looking for a Technorati tags plugin for WordPress) built by Ben O'Neill. It's clever, I particularly like the way it loads the last 12 hours of stories, rather than just the live feeds at the moment. It's probably just a few clicks from becoming a widget too.
Trafficeye was spotted in the wild by Alistair. It uses Microsoft Virtual Earth and plots BBC traffic data on top of the map. The creators describe trafficeye as your fast reference point for real-time UK traffic information.
The reason why i built this vista sidebar gadget is so i could have easy access to the bbc radio stations it was build using good old notepad ;) using javascript and html
An Apple dashboard widget that plays almost all listen again radio streams that are usually available via the BBC Radio player.
I wrote this widget a few months ago, it has been a big success and I notice it has even been mentioned a few times on these pages - looks like I'm a few days late for the competition though :-(
Anyway, the way the widget works at the moment is by scraping the radio player web pages looking for the radio stream links - this makes it very fragile to changes in the BBC web site. I would love to update it to use a xml feed instead.
Searches close to 300,000 video clips on www.bbc.co.uk and serves them up in the BBC media selector.
Its seems to be indexing the Beta BBC AV RSS feeds and looking at other sources. The HTML is very simple and the URL syntax nice enough. There is also support for simple Boolean searches.
Version 2.0 of website gTraffic.info has gone online. The site has been completely rewritten using Google Web Toolkit (GWT). This site takes traffic data, including BBC data, and plots it on a Google map. Highlights of the new site include
New look and feel.
Zebra list style with sortable columns.
Selection menu indicates which dataset is currently active.
All event categories are now listed in traffic view.
Map 'overview' button will take you back to dataset overview zoom level.
Some help pages (working on improving this).
'Busy' indicator.
Permalink feature.
I have gradually been making improvements to this site since it's initial launch in June 2005. I hope everyone likes the changes.
This is a Flash-based widget that shows the latest world headlines on a revolving 3D map. For each item in the XML feed, it shows the headline, the short summary and an indicator showing where in the world the item originated. Mouseover the map to pause and click to view that whole story. The headlines are refreshed every 15 minutes.
+ How it works
The Flash movie is built with two main subroutines - one that displays a 3D map of the world that turns automatically and can be triggered to move to a different location, and one that gathers the news feed (via a proxy php page to get around the Flash cross domain security issue), works out where each story belongs, and then triggers the map accordingly.
+ Improvements
At the moment it's pretty processor-intensive - doing all those 3D calculations takes its toll, but hey, it's just a prototype. If I had more time then I'd work on optimizing the routines to make it less demanding on the CPU. It would be nice to able to make the map far more detailed too.
This Google Gadget takes your favourite bands from the RSS feed off last.fm and then searches the BBC for both news about them and TV and Radio appearances they are making.
It is set by default to Radio 1's last.fm account, but you can change this to any account you want by pressing the edit button.
I made it so that I know where and when I can see my favourite bands on TV/Radio since I always seem to miss it somehow (plus the chance to win a 'well known music player':) ) If I had unlimited time/money I would like to figure out a way to distinguish between different things on BBC News/listings searchs (e.g. Keane the band, Roy Keane, Robbie Keane all turn up if you like Keane) and a way to make the listings look like links to call up the synopsis (they do work but they just don't look like links).
My Yahoo Widget is written to provide local traffic information direct to your desktop. The idea started, as there doesn't appear to be an easy way to find any road incidents within 5/10/15/etc miles of your current location.
The widget currently accepts a postcode and a range set in the preferences and retrieves the all incidents within the range from the specified postcode.
The server is updating its database from the Backstage Traffic Data feeds and then providing the information via a simple xml feed that is then used for both the Widget and the Google map on the site.
I just need to find some time to add the additional information in the Traffic feeds to the Widget and improve the quality and presentation of the information provided.
On the 23 May 2005 I submitted an 'Ajax RSS News Reader' prototype to the backstage website.
Following a comment about my News Reader, I've finally got round to building a Mac OS X 'Tiger' Dashboard widget version to enter in the widget competition.
Live'n'ByNet is a player widget for the live bbc radio feeds as listed by the programmes API. The widget uses the Zeepe framework - a web browser application/widget framework.
Why was it built?
Because I wanted a player that can be minimised to the tray and one that doesn't have hard coded urls to streams. It also lists the programmes via the API so you can set 'alarms' where it tunes to programmes when they start.
Improvements?
Access to an API that lists the listen again streams. It would be great to be able to choose favourites for the repeating programmes and in combination with the timings from the live streams then enable 'drag and drop personal channel' creation. Other improvements would be the programmes API becoming standardised and used by commercial radio as well - the player then becomes just like its real world equivalent.
The Chris Moyles Widget is a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X Tiger. The widget reads the Chris Moyles Blog RSS feed and displays it in a nice fashion. The widget also includes the links back to the main Chris Moyles Radio 1 web site.
As of right now, the widget does the job. I might add information to display if the next podcast is available or not. If there any suggestions for extra features please let me know.
I built the widget so that I could quickly and easily see when the blog was updated. What would be nice, is if there was a way to see who wrote the blog entry, as a different member of the team writes each day. It'll be nice to be able to display who wrote the blog entry in the widget.
This site shows how “in touch” the BBC News editorial team are with the general public using a simple percentage figure (see below), determined by comparing the top 10 headlines on the BBC News front page with the 10 most popular (most read) stories on the BBC News web site. Whilst the BBC editorial team should never strive to match the two lists and achieve 100% (as they are employed after all to decide what they think is most newsworthy) it is an interesting way to look at the data and see what really interests the general public. Having an overarching figure for this data means we can track how in touch the BBC are over time very easily.
Having started with a simple RSS importer for Second Life I've now put together a scrolling RSS and text display. This first one has 10 "character" elements, with each element supporting the characters A-Z,0-9 and about a dozen common symbols. Scroll rate is user configurable, but running at about 0.5 second per move works well. There is currently an LED or Arial font, I may do others - but users can upload their own. Text message or URL of RSS feed are set by chat commands.
To coincide with the release of Firefox 2, I've taken advantage of the new 'Live Text' Microsummaries feature, to show what's on air on BBC Radio Stations. I hope this will lead people to find other uses for this technology to grab info off the BBC website. Of course, it would be great ultimately; if this were to encourage the BBC to offer their own Microsummaries and save us all 'chasing the goalpoasts.' Enjoy!
Using Mike's location OPML (see http://mike260.dyndns.org/~mikef/countries.opml) and the BBC weather feeds, the following experimental IM bots should now be running:
They're very simple - add them as a new contact and say hello, and take it from there...
It's done in Perl, using an open-source framework ( http://www.duncanlamb.com/sdba/) and the various CPAN modules that provide connectivity to the individual IM protocols.
With all this talk of widgets I thought you might like a sneak peek of our BBC Radio Player + Last.fm Yahoo! widget
Last.fm is a social network around your listening habits. By creating and updating your profile with the songs you have listened to, Last.fm holds a record of your listening and offers musical and social recommendations. There are plugins to help you keep your profile up-to-date as you listen to iTunes, Winamp etc. but you can't update your profile while listening to the radio… until now.
Our experimental / prototype / beta (sorry, but we can't guarantee the quality of service) widget asks you to sign in to your Last.fm account and choose a BBC Radio station (only Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music and 1Xtra are available at the moment). The currently playing song is retrieved and is added to your profile (unless you decide to add songs manually) and other recommended artists are displayed.
These are subscribable iCals, built from the BBCs 7day schedule data. They're organised up by channel/radio-station, grouping, and genre.
They're only tested with Apple's iCal, and are quite likely broken for other apps.
Notes:
- When you subscribe, please don't tell iCal to refresh more than once per day
- Try changing the 'Show X hours at a time' in your iCal preferences for a clearer view
- The genre information is a bit patchy, and the grouping info is *really* patchy, so don't expect these cals to be comprehensive.
- iCal events show up in spotlight, so you can use it to search the tv/radio schedules
Stuff I would like to fix:
- Check and fix compatability with apps other than iCal
- Basic support for non-BBC channels
- Allow users to define and subscribe to customised cals containing their choice of programs and series.
I've noticed a lot of interest in the discussion groups about SMS applications. This script converts an SMS (text message) to a valid RSS 2.0 feed. It's developed using a free textback service offered by www.aql.co.uk .
A properly formatted SMS(see instructions) sent to 07766 40 41 42 is read by the aql server. It's then converted to a HTTP $_GET request which sends the phone number and message to a MySQL database via a PHP script on my server. You can then call an RSS feed to see the message at http://www.blears.net/vox/feed/rss.php
There are loads of possible developer uses for this including, blogs, message boards and voting type aps.
Mario has been doing more development work in Second Life and decided to show the popularity of certain TV shows on Technorati in Second Life. His feeling would be that you could glance at what's getting the most amount of buzz on Technorati and then watch it in Second Life with your friends.
This widget was born out of frustration with travel delays in the UK. Now, there is a quick and easy way to help solve that problem. Built for Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, our widget uses data supplied from backstage.bbc.co.uk and allows you to see the travel problems in either your region or by your mode of transport (road, rail, sea, air and cycling). The list you see is sorted by severity and can be filtered, so the most important travel news for you is at the top. To see more information on an item, just click it.
This script is a mash-up of the Google maps API and BBC travel news RSS feeds to create a live online map of traffic and travel news in the UK. If you click on the map markers it shows you the travel problem. I may improve it by changing the marker colour codes for severity of traffic problem. The page uses php to read the feeds and then dynamically produce the javascript for the map.
Matthew Somerville has worked on a few prototypes for navigating the huge archive of BBC News Stories over the past few months.
Matthew also has a massive archive of all the BBC News stories and there changes going back over a year which he keeps offline because of the amount of disk space it requires. But he uses subsets of it to create these prototypes.
Using old skool Flash version 5 actionscript and Quicktime's abillity to embed Flash that old, I was able to pull togther something I had been meaning to try for a long time. PHP on the server side reads the RSS feeds then throws back old skool flashvars to the Flash.
I was amazed to see the typer effect also working, but I had to use old methods there too. NO interactivity is available through Flash in SL. But it's a start. It reminds me of the huge 'Maiden' newsscreens I built for BBC News when I still worked there.
Mario Menti has created a Now and Next Google gadget which you can stick on your own site now Google has added the functionality to embed their gadgets in your own site. It displays not only whats on TV and Next, but also what's also on the Radio.
News ToolBar is a button for IE that takes in the latest RSS feeds from the BBC and updates in real-time. It could be improved with the addition of graphics. I've tried to avoid "tickers" which can distract, but it would be nice to be able to highlight a new article since they last looked.
TV-Browser is is a free electronic program guide. We offer Data for over 140 Channels. It has everything you need: reminder, create favorites (e.g. based on title or actor), search imdb, create a blog-entry and more.
TV-Browser is written in Java and easily extendible through plugins.
I used the BBC Backstage Data and the TV Anytime Java API offered by BBC to create a Plugin that is able to convert the Data in our Format.
The Webpage of TV-Browser in German, but we will translate it in the next few weeks. The Application is already translated.
Using some of the BBC backstage services we have created a free service for users to consolidate internet features into a personalized home page for their phone.
E.g. Users can add and personalize the following data to their phone:
- Add own RSS feeds
- Over 50 BBC RSS Feeds
- Enter keywords and display relevant BBC Feeds
- Search RSS Feeds
- Transfer Notes from your PC
- Weather Reports
- Traffic Reports
- Daily Horoscope
The service only works with phones that support WAP 2.0. The majority of phones sold in the last 2 years support WAP 2.0
We intially built the service for the USA market however Geoff Lynn from your mobile division pointed me towards the BBC Backstage.
Using the BBC backstage service we have now brought the service to UK users.
If you require further information please contact me
One of the things I frequently want to do is find out when a programme is on TV, and more importantly, when it is repeated (especially given that I live with 10 other students, and we have one TV in the kitchen).
However, there is basically no service available that lets you easily do this, with the exception of our TV listings site that we made for the backstage.bbc.co.uk competition a while ago.
That is the basis behind the idea of this prototype. Something that lets you easily find when something is on TV.
Its been almost 10 months since I first posted about my first backstage project, and 7 months since I updated it, but I've made a major update to the UI, hopefully for the better. It works best in Firefox, but does work in Explorer. The update only took me a few days this weekend, so there's probably a few bugs.
Couldn't think of a better title so named it Backstage on Google?
Since I had done a Web Based TV Guide in PHP (http://www.blueghosttv.co.uk/), and I was going to start work doing .net 2.0 stuff I thought I would develop a c# 2.0 PC App version to help me learn the language. It's very much a work in progress, and doesn't compare to DigiGuide (yet), but the basics are there. Please email me any comments or suggestions via my email address found on the website
mtraffic.org is a web service for handheld-friendly traffic reports, using data from the TPEG feed for UK road travel. mtraffic is designed to be
* Fast: A parsed representation of the feed is cached on the server; the minimum information is sent to the client
* Accessible: Simple, compliant XHTML renders correctly on all recent mobile browsers
* Convenient: Bookmark or remember short URLs - e.g. http://mtraffic.org/m25 - to check on frequent journeys; no need to download a client.
mtraffic is written in Python, and runs on Apache + mod_python. I'd be happy to share the source code, and I welcome any suggestions for its improvement.
This is a variation of my previous Mood News prototype. This is a page of the (hopefully!) Good News. Have a positive view of the news! I hope to have a podcast and RSS of this version soon.
Someone suggested off-line it would be nice to have an IM bot that pushes news to them automatically, without you having to request it. So I sat down last night and implemented something like this (pretty raw in its current state):
- you contact the bot to register you interest
- the bot sends out the latest 5 headlines from the BBC news page every hour (on the hour) to all those registered
- and of course, you can contact the bot again to remove yourself from the list
If anyone wants to try it out and let me know what they think, here's the details:
Google Talk and Jabber users, contact "bbcnewsflash@menti.name"
MSN users contact " bbcnewsflash@hotmail.co.uk"
AIM users contact "bbcnewsflash"
As I said, this is still very experimental, so don't be too surprised if it doesn't always work... but I'd be interested in people's feelings in general, whether something like this is useful (or just annoying..).
A summary of suggestions received/ next steps includes...
- only showing headlines once (the current format is showing the news items most recently updated, so the same stories may re-appear if they've been updated, a little like hourly network news I guess)
- being able to select news categories/keywords you're interested in
- being able to specify the times you want to receive the news flashes, not just hourly
In addition, I found some weirdnesses with Google Talk, but am not sure if anyone else has. It doesn't always seem to deliver the news, while delivery to a more "standard" Jabber client/account seems to work as planned.
TENBot converts RSS/ATOM/RDF feeds to the Text Electronic Newsletter standard which is gaining ground amongst visually impaired users as a preferred format for email newsletters. Applied to RSS feeds it lets them quickly find out what's in the feed and then navigate around it. The users uses their own screen-reader or magnifier.
Next stage will be to add a directory of TENBot enabled feeds, and maybe strike a deal within someone like Feedster...
This is a port of the live.com gadget, for use with Google's personalised homepage.
If Google accept it, it will eventually appear in their directory, in the meantime if you're interested you can install it by adding the developer module from the google.com/ig page (click Add Content > Create a Section and enter "developer.xml" in the text field), then add my module from the url http://backstage.menti.name/google/nownext.xml
Functionality-wise it does exactly the same as the live.com gadget:
* hover with your mouse over the programme title to see programme synopsis
* auto-refreshes every 10 minutes, or refresh manually using the refresh button
Sorry to those that are fed up with the "now/next" stuff, but since I'm producing these feeds, I've been thinking of other ways to use them. I haven't seen too many mobile-oriented prototypes here, so thought this may be useful:
Text the name of a BBC TV station (no radio stations - yet) to 07781 488578.
This will send you back a text message with what's on now/next on the TV channel you selected. It also contains a link to a xhtml-basic page that shows you the programme information (synposis), so if your phone supports clickable SMS messages you can click straight through to the programme details. At the moment the pages are xhtml only, so it won't work on old WAP1.0/wml-only phones (but it wouldn't be hard to add this capability, as the pages as ultra-simple..).
Finally, a shortcode instead of the long number would be nice, but I don't have that kind of spare cash at the moment :-). By the same token, I am paying for the outgoing SMS messages myself, so no guarantees that my hosted MSISDN isn't going to run out of credit at some point.
If you're interested have a go, let me know what you think, and how do you think it could be improved..
Please be aware that this link may not be 100% stable.
This is a little program that I wrote (and still writing at this time) that plays BBC Podcasts, the next version will allow downloads of any selected Podcasts in the BBC Radio download trials. I will be adding the download component within days, and also a minimize to system tray function. Any other suggestions will be appreciated but due to my level of programming, I may not be able to implement the feature (only time will tell!). This program was written in Delphi (7) and uses PHP for information requests that is needed by this POD player. I have used BBC logo's (please dont strike me down for this, if required, they will be removed) but I do not disclose in anyway that this program is/has been made by the BBC or any linked companies! I just used the BBC logo's as it is only BBC content that is used. ANY feedback will be taken, even if I like it or not! My homepage is still under construction at this time, but hopefully by 2006 there should be something that you guys can p!
lay with.
I wrote a little Microsoft gadget for their live.com beta site. You can install it and get the source from above URL.
live.com still seems rather experimental, I had various problems with Firefox, but for now on IE (after adding live.com and gadgets.start.com as trusted sites, see below), it seems to work reasonably well.
Summary:
A gadget that shows you what's currently showing on all UK BBC channels, and what's showing next.
Currently supported features:
- hover with your mouse over the programme title to see programme synopsis
- auto-refreshes every 10 minutes, or refresh manually using the refresh button
Important: due to some timeout setting/bug(?) with the live.com proxy when using Web.Network.createRequest, I had to use XmlHttpRequest, which means you will get permission errors if you don't add live.com and (after today's iframe change on the live.com site) gadgets.start.com to your list of trusted sites.
Charlotte is a natural language interface to the TVAnytime scheduling information. You can ask her in plain english questions like "when is spooks on", "what is on tomorrow night" and so on. For added impact we've given her an avatar and text-to-speech system - but these aren't essential to her function.
Further work will include more patterns for her AIML matching system, better handling of tag searches ("eg what gritty dramas are on this week"), more natural presentation of results, and conversely, a list mode when you just want a blow by blow schedule.
I listen to Radio Four a lot. For me - and I suspect many others who share my addiction - the schedule has a dual purpose. It tells me what's on, but also how far through the day we are. This clock is for everyone who leaves the house by 'Thought for the Day' and feeds the cat at quarter-past 'Front Row'.
You need an SVG viewer (such as http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install). Some viewers may have difficulty with the javascript - there's a tick box at the bottom to turn it off. You can also adjust the time zone and choose a different station to view.
It's built in Java with JSP. A daily cron task on my server downloads and unzips the feed. The JSP page that produces the clock refreshes its cache of programme details each day. I use the open source TVAnytime parser to handle the XML, creating simple 'programme' objects with title, date, summary and url fields to manipulate. Positioning the titles on the SVG needed just a little trigonometry, as did the initial angle of the three hands. The rotation uses the animateTransform tag with varying durations.
With more time, I'd like to
- avoid the javascript issue
- look at colour coding programmes by genre
- write the summaries in interesting ways (round the clock face?)
- offer a range of configurable designs
- offer direct 'listen again' links where possible
A prototype to take the BBC backstage 7-day schedule data, convert it to RDF and use it to build a dynamic and personalised web view. Our aim is to meet the BBC aspiration for a "cool, original and innovative [utility]"
WHY? To learn something about the use of RDF for open data storage and query; to build an AJAX application; to provide a useful and fun service.
HOW? the schedule data is provided as XML, so an XSLT transform turns this into RDF, which is served using Joseki. The client application uses the AJAX approach, using a standard Javascript library.
WHAT NEXT: Performance! appears to be largely javascript (client) rather than Joseki (server). Collect user feedback. We've a list of wish-list features about a mile long to prioritise. Oh, and it'd be polite to get it working on Microsoft IE :)
CREDITS: Chief Hackers were Paolo Castagna, Richard Cyganiak and Damian Steer. Ideas and encouragement from Steve Cayzer, Mark Butler and others in HP Labs Bristol.
This program displays a grid showing "what's on" on the freeview channel lineup (TV & Radio). The difference is that it also shows how much it expects you to like the show, on a scale from -9 (my idea of hell is being forced to watch 5 minutes of this show) to +9 (I would kill to be able to see 5 minutes of this show). It does this by allowing you to rate shows, and using a vector-search algorithm to see how similar each show is to the totality of shows that you have rated.
If I had more time, I'd optimize the site more, tune the weightings of the vector search, possibly add phrases instead of treating every word of the description sepperately, and perhaps most importatly provide documentation and missing polish.
